


The Light, Sans Mercy

by Kyra_Neko_Rei



Series: In Which I Mistake Inktober For A Writing Challenge [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Creative Misuse of a Temple, Gen, Revenge, Weaponized Plants, When you leave someone trapped in a temple for long enough they pick up a few tricks, and hold grudges
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 09:45:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16172573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra_Neko_Rei/pseuds/Kyra_Neko_Rei
Summary: Darth Vader returns to Malachor, the Sith temple, and his former apprentice. He doesn't much appreciate what she's done with the place.Prompts stolen from various Inktober challenges: Overgrown Ruins/Apprentice Witch/Bound in the Light.





	The Light, Sans Mercy

It is some time after the previous incident and Darth Vader is back on Malachor, which is rapidly proving to be a mistake.

  


Case in point: the Temple, restless and angry and giving the impression that someone has been poking it with a stick for quite some time now and it has just consciously let go of its last shred of temper.

  


Case in point: Ahsoka Tano, his former self’s apprentice, who has apparently spent her entire time marooned here bothering the temple and working herself into a fine fury at him for trapping her here.

  


Case in point: the plant life, which has diverted from its apparent mission to engulf the Temple (where had it all come from? it hadn’t been here last time) and wrapped spiraled-together twists of vine around his limbs, hindering him, then trapping him, then forcing him to his knees in what would have been some kind of grand sacrificial chamber before the roof caved in.

  


If he didn’t know better, he would think Ahsoka had mastered the Dark Side and turned the Temple to her bidding. It would be a fitting thing: to be defeated and killed by one’s apprentice is the only acceptable way for a Sith Lord to die, and of a certainty he has done enough to earn death many times over. Unfortunately, there is almost no darkness in her, and she has defeated him only by virtue of prodding the Temple into lashing out in the wrong direction, bombarding him with its defenses while she prepared and launched her own attacks.

  


In all honesty, it’s a beautiful assault, and he suffers the temptation to congratulate her. The plants are a nice touch, if highly inconvenient from his own perspective.

  


Footsteps, a familiar Force signature amidst the disorienting effects of the Temple, and Ahsoka Tano, rogue former Jedi, Rebel agent, and beloved apprentice of Anakin Skywalker, steps into his view.

  


His first reaction is concern, bullying its way past everything he and his master have made himself into: she is clearly hungry, pared down to muscle and sinew and bone, not a gram of fat anywhere except her montrals, which are thin as they are at the end of a growth spurt, which he can tell she hasn’t had. Either there isn’t sufficient food for her, or she isn’t getting it for some reason, and he can’t think of any reason a Force-sensitive apex predator like she is would be lacking for sustenance; there is animal life easily sensed in the wilderness surrounding them.

  


It is too soft an emotion, too much Anakin Skywalker, and he ruthlessly forces it away. Skywalker is dead, and Tano is an enemy, blazing with light like a merciless sun and looking at him with the eyes of something feral, starving, and furious.

  


It ought to be a contradiction, the Light and the anger, but it isn’t. He vaguely wonders if she’s planning to eat him.

  


“That would be a sort of not leaving you behind,” she says, reading his thoughts with ease (blast the Temple) and dredging up more of Skywalker with her reference to their previous conversation.

  


He struggles against the vines, which are thin but numerous and have coiled around themselves to form thick ropes. They hold firm, their not-quite-conscious life-force answering her will as though she were the sun, and a thousand leaves flare and twist in her direction, shifting around him. He wonders if she brought them here, encouraged them to tear the Temple apart. He is unsure which will win, ancient Sith magics or determined ex-Jedi-turned . . . whatever she is now.

  


“He is dead,” says Darth Vader, refusing to accept her stubborn loyalty, its underlying premise, or the part of him that wants so badly to not be alone. He will not be a man to have faith in, and he may not be her Master anymore but he will correct this foolishness.

  


She does something, a subtle prodding to the Temple, and it reacts, and he takes the brunt of it, a disorienting attack that has him reeling, held upright only by the vines, and in no position to prevent his lightsaber from spinning into her hand. She holds it reversed, in the style she favors, and he wonders if he’s about to be murdered with his own blade.

  


It would be fitting.

  


She looks at him, expressionless, pitiless, brutal as suns, for a long time, and he kneels in her living prison and looks up at her and eventually wonders if this was the sort of feeling those Jedi masters who were good at meditating felt like when they did it.

  


He is half lost in the strange meditation when she turns, captured saber still in hand, and walks away.

 


End file.
